In the second installment of Friday Food For Though – a series which we have started, rather impromptu, last Friday, we’d like to draw your attention to the OMA/ progress exhibition, along with the plethora of accompanying events, which has opened yesterday (6 October) at one of our favourite London venues – the Barbican.

Dedicated to the work of the acclaimed Dutch architectural practice OMA, the show is guest curated by the Belgium-based collective, Rotor (authors of the last year’s Belgian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale). Moreover, an impressive number of talks, debates, tours and walks led by associates and collaborators of OMA as well as invited experts will take place throughout the run of the exhibition.

The Muzeum Lotnictwa is one of the largest museums of aviation in the world. It is located in historically preserved buildings and hangars of the former historic airfield of Rakowice-Cyzyny in Cracow, the first airfield on polish terrain, build in 1912 for the air fleet no. 7 of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.

Mon 24.1.

'Dandy' exhibition design by Form Us With Love, photo by Jonas Lindström

The Swedish design practice Form Us With Love recently unveiled their design for the ‘Dandy’ exhibition at Nordiska Museet in Stockholm. The exhibition examines this 18th and early 19th century’s lifestyle and presents the details that makes the typical Dandy.

The Basel based architects Herzog & de Meuron greatly enriched the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, where architectural icons such as Alvaro Siza, Frank Gehry, Tadao Ando and Zaha Hadid carried out some of their most expressive works. Herzog & de Meuron’s stacked archetypical houses are the new domicile for Vitra’s Home Collection and will from now on be open Monday to Sunday from 10 am to 6 pm.

VitraHaus by Herzog & de Meuron, photo by Iwan Baan

“The concept of the VitraHaus connects two themes that appear repeatedly in the oeuvre of Herzog & de Meuron: the theme of the archetypal house and the theme of stacked volumes. In Weil am Rhein, it was especially appropriate to return to the idea of the ur -house, since the primary purpose of the five-storey building is to present furnishings and objects for the home. Due to the proportions and dimensions of the interior spaces – the architects use the term ‘domestic scale’ – the showrooms are reminiscent of familiar residential settings. The individual ‘houses’, which have the general characteristics of a display space, are conceived as abstract elements. With just a few exceptions, only the gable ends are glazed, and the structural volumes seem to have been shaped with an extrusion press. Stacked into a total of five storeys and breathtakingly cantilevered up to fifteen metres in some places, the twelve houses, whose floor slabs intersect the underlying gables, create a three-dimensional assemblage – a pile of houses that, at first glance, has an almost chaotic appearance.”